Podcast Episode 110
Imagine getting a letter in the mail—and then another, and then another—telling you that if you don’t pay $25,000 to a company you’ve never heard of, you’ll have to shut down the small business that you’ve worked for years to build.
That’s exactly the situation faced by a group of podcasters several years ago, including comedian Marc Maron, who hosts the WTF podcast. They were being threatened by a patent troll called Personal Audio, which claimed that podcasters were infringing on a patent that covered “disseminating media content in a serialized sequence.”
On this episode of How to Fix the Internet, Marc Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien to talk about how they decided not to give in, and how podcasters came together to support EFF’s work to defeat the patent.
Patent trolls like Personal Audio don’t make products or services themselves, but instead use their patents to threaten litigation against others, unless they get paid a patent licensing fee. They’re a particular problem in the software industry, which has always been a bad fit for patents. EFF has been fighting against patent trolls in Congress and in the courts for more than 15 years.
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
- The prior art, or evidence, of earlier technology that EFF was able to present to courts to prove that the so-called “podcasting patent” was invalid
- How the landmark Alice v. CLS Bank Supreme Court decision has helped make patent law better, but still didn’t solve the problem of patent trolls
- Why patent trolls are a drain on innovation
- How we should think about which ideas should be building blocks for the public good, and which should be owned
- Why the community that came together around the podcasting patent fight was critical to EFF’s victory
- How EFF prevailed when the patent troll tried to get the names of EFF donors
Marc Maron has been writing and performing comedy for over 20 years. He’s the host of the WTF Podcast, and is on Twitter at @marcmaron.
If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org.
You’ll find legal resources—as well as a full transcript of the audio at eff.org/pod110.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Additional music is used under creative commons licence from CCMixter includes:
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11
Podcasts 
